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Among Thieves development
Game development gives a behind the scenes look at how and why a game is made. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves improved and expanded on the game development of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Game and Level Design Lead designer and writer Neil Druckmann was interviewed on Gamasutra in Reflecting On Uncharted 2: How They Did It and tells us what led to the Train and Collapsing Building levels: *"We really wanted to push the technology forward that would allow us to do that, so one of the first things we did was create a tech that would allow us to have moving objects that let us keep Drake and all the allies and other NPCs on those moving objects with all of their mechanics and all of their move sets." Excerpts from Game Developer Magazine's article by Richard Lemarchand titled In-Depth: How Planning Derailed, Playtesting Redeemed Uncharted 2 bears out the following on how they play tested, polished, and rebalanced levels: *"As they played, we uploaded metrics about their actions to a database over the network—things like how long it took them to complete each part of the game, or how frequently they died between continue points. We put the data into a spreadsheet and looked at the median values for each group. After color-coding cells with values above or below certain targets, parts of the game that were potentially problematic immediately jumped out at us. We then started looking at the gameplay videos to investigate each potential problem." Combat Design Benson Russell's Gamasutra Feature article A Deeper Look Into The Combat Design Of Uncharted 2 reveals enemy hierarchy: *"In addition to shotgun, rocket launcher, and sniper classes, we added a fully armored class, a heavy class that wields a mini gun, riot shield class, and we separated our basic grunt into light and medium classes (the light and dark uniformed soldiers)." Multiplayer Design Naughty Dog designed a multiplayer, networked game over the Internet that coordinates up to ten different players and gives them the illusion that gameplay is perfectly synchronized during a match. Variable network lag can break that illusion and potentially be abused to give players an advantage. Arne Meyer, Naughty Dog Community Coordinator has revealed some details on how multiplayer works, citations are below: *Players log on to a central server, which: **Sychronizes their account stats, provides live updates, and displays the entry message. **Registers player status: in the lobby, playing a game, looking at the leaderboards, or playing a custom game as well as your other PSN friends list: in single player, playing another game, or off line. **Determines network proximity/robustness/lag? **Manages creating and joining parties in the lobby, but players who are not at the same live update and title update version will not be able to join each other. **Allows entry to playlists and custom games, checking minimum and maximum player counts. *A player or party starts a play list and the central server fills the remaing slots with players: **The party leader's level represents all of the party, regardless of individual player levels. **Matching is done for players and parties of recently finished matches followed then by individual players. **Level and network robustness weigh on matching. *The match starts and peer to peer networking sends out player data to the other players as well as the central server, which tracks game events such as kills, environmental changes, medals, etc. **"...one player does serve as the master sync point among all players, but that master or authority can migrate across users or nodes within that structure." ***We see this as short interruptions to the match with the "Migrate Host" message, then players restart in their initial home position to continue the match. *The central server logs player match stats to eventually be added to the public web server player stats. Category:Uncharted 2 Category:General Cleanup